The inconvenient ‘public women’ of history
Live MintIn 1809, a British official took great umbrage at the conduct of an Indian prince. No, the real problem was the discomfort of a certain type of man with the “whore"—or more precisely, women whose influence stemmed from unpoliced sexual access to other, more powerful males. The writer Kavitha Rao in her book Lady Doctors tells how Kadambini Ganguly, among the earliest Indian women to qualify as a doctor, was slandered in the Bengali press as a “whore". Devadasis resisted: “We are," one 1929 memorandum declares, women who “possess…all the privileges of the males in regard to property, special laws of inheritance", etc. The “whore"— a spectrum from the “public woman" to the married, educated female who refuses to conform—has greater agency in some respects.
Discover Related